Chitgate noise in Assembly

Odisha Assembly was on Saturday adjourned twice following a pandemonium over the chitfund scam and the issue of non-revision of royalty for major minerals by Congress members and treasury bench MLAs respectively.

The issue of chitfund scam was raised by leader of opposition Bhupinder Singh of Congress as soon as the House sat for the day. Singh wanted to know from the Speaker about the reason behind rejection of his party’s adjournment notice on the matter of chitfund scam.

“Chitfund scam is a major issue which hit lakhs of poor investors. We had given a notice seeking Speaker’s permission to allow a debate on the subject. The notice has not been accepted due to unknown reasons,” Singh said.

As Singh urged the speaker to accept the notice, his colleagues rushed to well of the house holding placards. While some of them staged demonstration in the well, other attempted to climb on the Speaker’s podium leading to adjournment of the proceedings for an hour till 11.30.

When the House re-assembled, both opposition and treasury bench members were on their feet shouting at the top of their voices.

Government deputy Chief Whip Sanjay Dasburma raised the mineral royalty revision issue, saying the state has been sustaining a loss of Rs 5 crore every day as the Centre did not revise the royalty rates.

“The state has so far sustained a loss of about Rs 2500 crore due to non-revision of royalty,” Dasburma said.

He was supported by ruling BJD members who shouted anti-UPA slogans and mentioned alleged central negligence towards Odisha leading to adjournment of the house for the second time till 3 pm.

Giving clarification on behalf of the government, Parliamentary Affairs minister Kalpataru Das said the Speaker rejected the Congress’ notice in order to ensure passage of important bills.